Adkins, John B. (1851-1939)
ADKINS
Posted By: Karon Velau (email)
Date: 12/16/2017 at 20:28:53
John Beckwith Adkins
(December 21, 1851 - September 16, 1939)Tradition says a man named Atkins, "an Irishman from Wales," came over about 1820, and settled in Ohio. His son Lewis, moved to near Galesburg, Illinois, where his own son, John Beckwith Adkins, was born in 1851. John grew up, married Sarah Catherine Tucker [whose father was called "Old Dan Tucker"], and had a family of nine boys and a girl in order: Clinton, Edward, Edith, Clell, Lawrence, Ralph, John, Reuben, Russell, and Dean.
In 1892, after Ralph was born, the family moved to the area where Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska met, and in 1918, up to the Council Bluffs area. Except for Clinton and Lawrence, who died young, each Adkins married and raised several children. Previously the Adkinses had rented farms, but then they bought land, mostly near Council Bluffs.
Edward moved to Oregon about 1912, and Edith married in Hamburg, Iowa, where she remained. Clell, who followed to Council Bluffs in 1923, became the first farm owner in the family. Ralph's family lived in a log cabin in the 1930's, where Malmore Acres is now. John Jr. paid for his farm largely by selling melons and vegetables. Russell fished a bottle from the river with a girl's name and address in it, looker her up and married her. Two years later, Reuben married her sister. Dean, who bought a farm half covered with cottonwood trees, sold enough trees for lumber to finish paying for it.
Many descendants of this family still live in Council Bluffs, in the bottom lands south of town and in the hills north and east of town. There have been no famous legislators or scientists, but a tribe of honest, hardworking Americans.
Sources:
Transcribed by Gail Meyer Kilgore from Pottawattamie County, Iowa, "Makers of Fire" by Pottawattamie History Book Committee, 1978
Iowa Death Records 1921-1940, FamilySearch.org
Pottawattamie Biographies maintained by Karyn Techau.
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